When I launched this website and started blogging in 2016, I didn’t have any real idea what I was going to blog about. All I knew was that, having decided to write a new novel after a 25-year hiatus, a website for authors was now mandatory.
I also knew that my website/domain name should be my own name so that when agents, editors, publishers Googled or Binged me, they would find information about me and my writing.
I knew nothing about brand or building a platform back then. I still don’t really, but I figured if agents, editors and publishers were going to google or bing me they should get a picture of who I am immediately; for example they should know that I’ve been writing for a living all my life, and that I’d already had two novels traditionally published.
Hundreds of Blogs
During the next six years as I worked on my third novel, I posted close to 260 blogs. The tagline I chose for my website, The Perils and Pleasures of A Writing Life lent itself to broad interpretation as my regular readers have discovered.
I posted once a week, every week except for a 10-month hiatus during the pandemic in 2020, and another hiatus in January 2023 while I was re-organizing and revising sections of this website. Below are the fruits of my efforts so far.
How To Navigate My Re-Vamped Website
There are two main elements to my website: 1) Pages and 2) Posts (more commonly known as blogs.)
Pages are found in the menu bar of the website. There are six Pages in the menu bar. Four of them are static (Books, Welcome, About Me, Contact Me) which means they don’t change for the most part from week to week. Two Pages titled Articles, Notes & Squibs and Fool Her Once —as detailed below— are chronological compilations (from most recent to oldest) of the blogs I have posted since launching the website.
Pages
Books is the landing page for my website. It focuses predominantly on my latest thriller, Fool Her Once —although if you scroll down far enough, you’ll see references to and reviews of my first two thrillers, Scandal and Delusion.
Books is the page you will usually land on if you click on the first google entry for Joanna Elm. Here you can access a seven-chapter excerpt of FHO from the Look Inside feature on the Amazon books website. You can also read a selection of FHO reviews and accolades from other established authors, reviewers and book bloggers.
Welcome is this page —which now hopefully makes it easier to navigate the website and 260+ blogs. I’m providing a short description of each Page and listing the 8 Categories into which the 260 Posts/Blogs fall– with links to a selection of my favorite blogs in each category.
About Me has new photos and additional info about me as well as links at the bottom of the page to more articles and interviews with me in the mainstream press and on influential blogs by other authors.
ContactMe : as the title suggests is where you can reach me with a question, comment —or with a screenshot on the rare occasion I might want to post an exclusive offer for “swag” in return for proof of purchase during a designated time period.
Articles, Notes & Squibs chronologically lists every blog I’ve posted from the most recent to the oldest. Scrolling down, you will see that only the first couple of paragraphs of each blog are shown. To read the rest of the blog, you can either click on the blog title or on the Continue link. All the blogs/posts cataloged here are also separated into eight categories in the TOPICS section in the sidebar on each page.
Fool Her Once is listed in the menu bar as a Page. However, technically, it is a category which you can also retrieve from the TOPICS section in the sidebar. Fool Her Once blogs cover anything and everything to do with my latest thriller from the date of signing my contract with my new publisher CamCat Books.
So, for example, as well as posting news about signing up with CamCat Books, I also blogged about Why hiring a freelance editor for FHO was the best thing I did . Also, you may want to know, Why the North Fork of Long Island is the setting for the novel , How I Chose the Title, Fool Her Once ; How getting a book published in 2022 changed in the 25 years since my first two novels were published; How I Stayed in Shape during the writing and edits for FHO . For three weeks, starting here, I also posted a summary of FHO’s plot in photos.
Until, I knew my publisher was happy with Fool Her Once as a title, I referred to my new thriller as Book 3 knowing that publishers often change titles after acquiring a manuscript. So anywhere you see a reference to Book3, FHO is actually the book I’m writing about in my blogs.
POSTS/ BLOGS
On virtually every Page of this website, there is a sidebar widget titled: TOPICS. It has a drop-down menu of 8 categories listed alphabetically with the number of blogs/posts available in each category.
As well as FHO, the categories include: Behind The Scenes/Book3; On Writing; Writers; Books I Love; TV& Entertainment; Personal; News Squibs. By scrolling down, you’ll find my selected favorites in each category. I’ve given you plenty of links to directly access blogs you might be interested in. Inevitably some of the categories overlap, however. For example:
Behind the Scenes/Book3 & On Writing
As an author returning to writing crime fiction after a 25-year hiatus, I attended conferences, seminars, workshops, bootcamps and book festivals; I subscribed to Masterclasses where best-selling authors are the instructors; sometimes I met or phoned bestselling authors and interviewed them for my blogs ; I joined a writers group and a bookclub.
So, events like these led to blogs where I shared what I learned from world-famous writing coaches like Robert Mckee whose three-day Story seminar I attended in New York to find out what makes a good story. I also blogged about the exclusive 5-day Algonkian Author-Mentor workshop in St. Augustine, Florida where I had a total epiphany about my antagonist in Fool Her Once after talking to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler. This led to five days of solitude so I could focus on the “bad guy” and knock him into shape. Later, I sweated over the writing of a perfect First Ten Pages for the Writers Digest online boot camp .
I also shared what I learned from MasterClass bestselling authors like James Patterson and Dan Brown, and TV series creator and writer, Shonda Rhimes. Speakers at lunches of the Palm Beach Writers Group and at the Palm Beach Book Festival also contributed to my blogs when they shared their expertise. A favorite at the PBWG, Andrew Gross (The Fifth Column) spoke about the experience of co-authoring with James Patterson and gave us 10 super tips relating to the craft of writing and getting published.
If you enter “Palm Beach Book Festival” in the search widget of this website, you’ll be able to access the expertise (and anecdotes) of authors like Dan Rather, Ben Bradlee, Kwame Alexander, Alan Cummings, Dani Shapiro, Gail Sheehy and Susan Orlean who all appeared at the Book Festival over the last six years.
Behind The Scenes/Book3
This category includes many blogs about my own writing process. After last writing fiction 25 years ago, I had to adjust to a whole new book publishing industry where authors are expected to launch websites, use social media and market their own books even when they have a traditional publisher.
So, a number of blogs in the Behind The Scenes/Book3 category address my personal writing process in this brave new world: engaging with social media, using online tools like querytracker to search for a literary agent; and what I found to be the best part of marketing my new novel. I also blogged about the fun parts of researching a novel, like traveling to specific locations –especially if you need a boat to reach them. As for what an author does in the in-between times of writing and revising and re-editing and waiting for responses to submissions? Here’s what I did.
Writers
I’ve reserved this category mainly for authors & writers I’ve met personally or interviewed on the phone or at book signings. Here are links to my blogs about James Patterson, J.D Barker (now director and vice-president of the International Thriller Writers Organization, back then an emerging self-published author), R.G. Belsky ( a friend and former fellow journo in the NYC tabloid business), Hank Phillippi Ryan, and Eldon Farrell (an indefatigable self-published author who in the time it took me to write my third novel has published ten.)
Also here you’ll find my coverage of book signings of friends like my former editor at Star magazine, Les Hinton, and interviews with and guest posts by friends I met at the workshop in St. Augustine. The latter group includes Gregory L. Renz, who was the first of our group to have the WIP he brought to the workshop published as Beneath The Flames; Doug Spak who is now writing and selling screenplays and Mandi Bean who most recently temporarily moved to Ireland to work there on her MFA.
This category also includes blogs about that rare writer phenom: authors whose debut novels race to the top of bestseller charts. In my blogs, I’ve analyzed how authors like A.J. Finn (The Woman in the Window), Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient) and T.J. Newman (Falling) achieved a debut author’s dream.
Books I Love
When I’m not writing, I read. A lot. I read newspapers, websites, blogs, magazines, books on the craft of writing or blogging, and, of course, books in my genre. Over the last six years, I’ve read hundreds of psychological/domestic suspense/serial killer thrillers while writing my own.
I’ve mentioned/rated most of those in round-ups on my blogs. For example, if you think I should have/might have read and reviewed Jennifer Hillier’s Jar of Hearts or The Other Mrs by Mary Kubica or any other title in that genre just enter the titles in the Search widget on this website.
I’ve devoted full blogs to fiction by my very favorite best-selling authors, like The Maze by Nelson DeMille or Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman or You by Caroline Kepnes. Mostly however, the books in this category are non-fiction books that have taken me away from the world of fictional domestic noir.
Check out my reviews of Jimmy The King, the non-fiction account of the dirtiest cops and law enforcement officials on Long Island; or the amazing How Not to Get Murdered which I described as a book I’d make any daughter of mine read twice; or my review of the fabulous I’ll Be Gone In The Dark.
Otherwise, many of my reviews appear on my author page on the Goodreads website. You can follow me there, too. In fact, I would really love for you to do that.
TV & Entertainment
In this category, the TV series and movies I’ve blogged about have a strong crime element, and tend to focus on true crime where serial killers have been brought to justice often with the help of amateur online sleuths. Or where a mystery surrounds the real villain in a domestic drama as in The Staircase.
That said, my favorite fictional serial killer TV thriller of all time remains La Mante. It’s French and produced with that down-to-earth European sensibility that doesn’t flinch from the gory in-your-face depictions or themes.
News Squibs
As I say above, way above, in my intro to this Welcome Page, I had no real clear idea what I should blog about when I started more than six years ago. My natural inclination as a reporter/journalist was to seek out news tidbits that were entertaining, provocative, and those that coincided with interests of authors/writers.
Hence my early blogs were in the News Squibs category. They included snippets about the Bad Sex Writing Awards; about Language Rules, as well as vignettes about exhibits at local events like the Palm Beach Jewelry, Art and Antiques show. The most entertaining News Squib I blogged about was the lawsuit against the manufacturer of a smart vibrator. Yes, you’ve got to read it!
Personal
As well as being an author, I’m also a journalist and an attorney, and a wife and mother, and gambler, foodie, wine lover, tennis and golf fanatic, health nut, so I’ll occasionally write about stuff that has nothing to do with the writing –or reading– of novels. But, it’s stuff that makes me laugh, or makes me curious, or makes the journalist/essayist in me sit up and take notice, or it pisses me off, or it’s a spoof on what I’ve learned from a long-running TV series— or I simply want to share some good news about family or friends because I don’t have a Facebook account.
I also post my annual July 4th blog in this category. It has evolved from a glowing tribute to my adopted country to reflect my sadness at what this country is becoming.
A recent Personal blog was the saddest I’ve ever posted: a tribute to my younger brother who passed away in April 2022. I miss him every day. I would probably have gotten the re-vamping of my website together much faster had Michael been around to help me. His death knocked the stuffing out of me.
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Credit top photo: Bigstockphoto.com